almide-shell

A desktop shell for Hyprland — bar, launcher, notifications, on-screen displays — written in Almide, with nothing under it but the language runtime: the Wayland protocol, the layer-shell surfaces, Hyprland's IPC, the fonts and the pixels are all Almide (snaidhm supplies the Wayland client, the CPU canvas and the font reader).

The goal

Show that you can ask an AI to change your desktop, and it doesn't break.

Omarchy is Hyprland plus a shell written in QML (Quickshell). This project replaces that shell layer with Almide, and then measures what matters: when a user asks an LLM "add the weather to the bar" or "move notifications to the top right", how often the change works on the first try — against the same requests made of the QML shell. Almide's mission is to be the language LLMs write most accurately; a desktop shell is code people already hand to LLMs every day.

Milestone	Done when
M1 bar	A layer-shell bar on Hyprland shows workspaces (Hyprland IPC), a clock, battery and volume; no Rust but the language runtime
M2 shell	Launcher, notification daemon (D-Bus in Almide), volume/brightness OSD
M3 daily use	A week as the only shell: 0 crashes, idle CPU ~0 %, start under 100 ms
M4 evidence	30 "customize the shell" tasks in almide-dojo: modification survival rate, Almide vs QML, same model

Not in scope: the compositor (Hyprland stays), GPU rendering.

Try it

Without Hyprland on your machine: test/hyprland/try.sh runs Hyprland in Docker with the bar, notifications, OSD and launcher, and shows its screen in a browser at http://localhost:6080/vnc.html?autoconnect=1&resize=scale. Alt+Space opens the launcher, Alt+Enter a terminal, Alt+↑/↓/M the volume, Alt+N sends a notification, Alt+1..4 switches workspaces.

Status: M1

almide run main.almd under Hyprland (or any compositor with wlr-layer-shell) draws the bar across the top of the output:

• Workspaces from Hyprland's IPC; the active one highlighted; a click switches (the dispatch socket), and the bar follows Hyprland's event socket.
• Clock in local time — the time zone read from /etc/localtime or $TZ (TZif and POSIX rules, src/tz.almd; checked against Python's zoneinfo over 18 zones from 1900 to 2100 by test/tz_oracle.py).
• Volume from PipeWire (wpctl), battery from sysfs.
• The binary links no Rust crate beyond the runtime (1.1 MB, no wgpu/winit).
• Idle: one poll over the Wayland and Hyprland sockets until the next thing is due — 1 clock tick of CPU in 20 s (0.05 %), 25 MB resident.

What it shows is src/config.almd — the file to edit, or to ask an AI to edit:

let LEFT: List[Module] = [Workspaces]
let CENTER: List[Module] = [Clock("%a %b %d  %H:%M")]
let RIGHT: List[Module] = [Volume, Battery]

test/hyprland/run.sh runs it on a real Hyprland in Docker (vkms + Mesa's software renderer): two windows on workspaces 1 and 3, a click on the bar's "1", screenshots before and after, and the idle measurement.

Status: M2 (in progress)

• Notifications — notifyd.almd owns org.freedesktop.Notifications on the session bus, over a D-Bus implementation written in Almide (src/dbus.almd: SASL EXTERNAL, the marshalling rules, messages both ways). notify-send and gdbus talk to it unchanged: Notify, CloseNotification (with the NotificationClosed signal), GetCapabilities, GetServerInformation. Cards stack at the top right, wrap text (Japanese included), expire, and close on a click.
• Launcher — launcher.almd (bind it: bind = SUPER, SPACE, exec, launcher): the installed applications from the XDG .desktop files (src/apps.almd), filtered as you type, Up/Down/Tab to pick, Enter starts it through Hyprland's exec, Escape closes. It sizes itself to the room the output has.
• Any scale — every surface draws at the output's scale, fractional ones included (wp_fractional_scale_v1 + wp_viewporter), and stays sharp: the canvas draws in units, so no drawing code multiplies by the scale. SCALE=1.6 test/hyprland/run.sh checks it.
• OSD — osd volume +5 | -5 | mute, osd brightness +5 | -5, bound to the media keys (the lines are in osd.almd): the first run becomes the daemon, later ones hand their command over a Unix socket, so repeated presses update one panel. Volume through PipeWire's wpctl; brightness written to sysfs, or through logind's SetBrightness on the system bus where sysfs is not the user's to write.

Next

• Volume and battery from events instead of reads every 5 and 30 s (PipeWire's protocol, UPower over D-Bus) — the last periodic wakes.
• Partial redraw (damage).
• The bar hears of a volume change only at its next 5-second read: events from PipeWire itself.